


Here You Come A-Knocking, Knocking On My Door

by Adelheid_Desgoffe_Taxis



Series: Zubrowka: A World Inside Out [3]
Category: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 18:50:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1828516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adelheid_Desgoffe_Taxis/pseuds/Adelheid_Desgoffe_Taxis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>…And I’ve never met a man like you before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here You Come A-Knocking, Knocking On My Door

…<<<…()…>>>…

 

When Odette Xavier hears someone knock loudly, urgently on the wooden door of her small shabby apartment in the city’s poorest foothill part, she doesn’t know who on earth this can be at so late an hour. Because of her old leg injury, she rarely ventures outside Kohlbricken, the dingy quarter where she lives, and for that reason she doesn’t have too many friends. Besides, her customers usually call on her in the morning.

 

Odette has to unwillingly interrupt her current task of dusting the few pieces of furniture her miserable abode is equipped with and, slowly because of a bad limp she’d got used to long ago, walks over to the door. After a moment or two of uneasy silent hesitation, still toying with a moist duster in hand, gingerly she unlocks the heavy bolt.

 

At the same moment, swift prickly gusts of cold night air together with melancholic faraway chiming of church bells enter belatedly her squalid apartment.

 

The old little house faces a muddy, narrow, unpaved cul-de-sac lane crowded with similar ramshackle buildings, where the only landscape consists for the most part of linens drying on clotheslines and countless odds-and-ends alongside the dirty walls and gutters filled with murky gurgling water and a thin ribbon of sky between overhanging roofs.

 

Odette’s younger brother, Serge Xavier, who is serving as a majordomo or a butler or whatever at the great ancient Schloß Lutz on the outskirts of the city, often tells her about the sheer beauty of his workplace. About its numerous spacious rooms and hallways, its antique furniture, its rich collections of priceless paintings and rare books and classic sculptures, its old tapestries and lavish woodwork, its picturesque parks and lush woodlands. After he had started working there, he tried several times to secure a job at the castle for his sister, but each time unsuccessfully. The Desgoffes-und-Taxis had made it clear that they didn’t need the handicapped anywhere on their estate, even if this one was a very diligent and unfailing and honest washerwoman who would never catch the eyes of the owners’ guests or retail gossip about the residents. For this reason, Odette has to stay here, seeing her only friend and relative now and then and receiving scarce sustenance sometimes from him, but mostly from her own occupation.

 

Odette looks intently at the visitor. Here, in the late-evening darkness, enveloped with small whirling snowflakes, a man is standing casually on the threshold, facing her – not very tall, gloomy-looking man clad in a long black leather coat which glistens dimly in the light of a distant streetlamp.

 

Odette stands silent for a short time, studying his pale face, harsh and clean-shaven, his simple short haircut, scarred forehead, protruding cheekbones and morose deep-sunken grey eyes, and reasons that he must be in his late forties or early fifties. And that she is very afraid of him.

 

And that is all she can say about the strange man at the moment.

 

The first autumn snowflakes swarm around the visitor slowly, hesitantly, as if they were fearful of him, as if they just didn’t want to fall on his close-cropped head and powerful shoulders, as if they knew something about him that would leave the washerwoman simply horrified.

 

The ominous stranger is silent at first, as is Odette herself. Then he shifts his weight a little and withdraws something from his coat pocket, bringing the object close to her face. Odette looks unwittingly at his hand, and feels at once fierce inner coldness creeping into her extremities: on his strong fingers glimmer sinisterly heavy brass knuckledusters featuring tiny human skulls.

 

The object the man hands her is an engraved calling card with black Gothic inscription on bright white stock, which reads:

 

“J. G. Jopling, Esq. PRIVATE INQUIRY AGENT.”

 

Odette looks back up to him, nervously. His name, uncommon among the inhabitants of this country, tells her that the man is not a native of these places, just like her brother and herself. Despite this, he speaks to her in the local language, but with some vague accent she’d never heard before.

 

\- _I’m looking for Serge Xavier, a young man in the service of my employers, the family Desgoffe und Taxis of Schloß Lutz_.

 

His voice is low, grumbling, deceptively calm, his words are weighed, precise, matter-of-factly, - but at the same time there is something intimidating about them, about that man’s attitude, about his personality.

 

And – something more. Odette feels unexpectedly, with some surprise, strange gravity pulling her towards this man. It must be, she realizes with unnerving anxiety, precisely the sort of longing she’d heard much about but had never experienced before.

 

But then, in an instant, the name this man had mentioned strikes her mind with all its might.

 

Serge.

 

This neat, sweet, naïve, charming man with his impeccable posture and elegant white tailcoat and small weak eyes which are forever swollen after some severe disease, the man who hadn’t done evil to anyone in his whole life. Her only relative.

 

He is looking for her Serge.

 

Oh, God.

 

For the sake of her brother, she tries to quash the sudden absurd feelings towards the unwelcome visitor.

 

\- _Yes, sir?_ – She says timidly, warily, intent on staying, or at least seeming to be, calm and reserved and business-like.

 

\- _You’re his sister?_ – He inquires without further ado.

 

\- _Yes, sir,_ \- She admits with a slight nod of her head.

 

\- _Seen him lately?_ – He asks, looking fixedly at her, surely seeking in her plain features for some hints of possible dishonesty.

 

Odette tries diligently to feign surprise.

 

\- _No, sir._

 

The man’s cold, heartless, somewhat slanting eyes narrow into slits as he repeats hoarsely, a hint of mockingly ironic doubt in his voice:

 

\- _No, sir?.._

 

\- _No, sir._ \- She confirms, trying her best to sound firm and innocent, but nonetheless proving unable to keep her voice from quavering.

 

\- _I need to find him right away,_ \- he declares in the same grim, slightly tired manner which makes Odette both afraid and excited at the same moment. - _For his own safety… And everyone else’s._

 

When he speaks, light transparent clouds of steam escape his harsh lips, immediately dissolving in the frosty air. In the soft meager light of her home, his face seems older, his scars resemble wrinkles.

 

\- _If he shows up_ … - He growls menacingly.

 

Odette’s face, which has always been exceptionally pale, becomes paler than ever, and she swallows nervously, though, she hopes, quietly enough.

 

\- _Yes, sir?_ – She ventures tentatively, squeezing her almost-forgotten duster harder still.

 

Her own voice trembles more and more with every moment, with every word the man pronounces.

 

At last, he instructs her curtly, with an air of darkly amusement:

 

\- _Tell him, Jopling says: “Come home”_.

 

After an awkward pause, Odette nods meekly, not daring to say anything more, - not that he wants any answer, of course.

 

Without a good-bye, he turns away and walks down the lane, not looking back once.

 

With instantly weak, trembling fingers Odette shuts the door and locks it as swiftly as possible. At once she hears the loud revving of a motorcycle somewhere up the narrow lane. So, this man rides a motorcycle. In her mind’s eye she sees him decisively mounting his iron steed, flinging one of his strong legs over the saddle, and she shudders, certainly not expecting such a reaction in herself.

 

Oh, she must warn her dear brother of the impending danger as soon as possible, she understands for sure. This man, without doubt, knows pretty well how to do terrible things, most of all how to kill; and of course he had killed before – most certainly, has done so in the immediate past. He is hired to kill, after all. He is neither an inquiry agent nor a detective nor whoever else. He is a hitman. A murderer. It is written on his face as clearly as it is clear that he wears his custom-made knuckledusters not just for purposes of showing-off. Even the lowliest washerwoman like herself is able to understand this truth.

 

But, as she puts out the light and lies in her old squeaking bed, she cannot help recalling her visitor’s features, his strong arms, his broad shoulders, his stern masculine countenance and his steadfast look. She wonders vaguely what cologne he uses, if any, what he likes to drink.

 

She knows very well that men don’t love her. All her life long she has been too plain for their tastes, and besides, she has too bad a limp. Everything people ever needed of her was only the results of her work; and she knew no other life than the one of permanent thankless labor. Thus, it is no wonder she knows almost nothing about the true relationships of man and woman. Therefore, her fantasies are sweet, timid, innocent, concentrating purely on gentle hugs, kisses and caresses.

 

…<<<…()…>>>…

 

When he comes again, in the early hours of a late-October morning this time, Odette Xavier doesn’t know what to do, how to react.

 

Despite the urgent message she had received from her brother a couple hours ago, by way of radio telegraphy (“Pack your things *stop* be ready to leave at moment’s notice *stop* hide-out is vicinity of Gabelmeister’s Peak *stop* destroy this message all my love *full stop*”), she dares not leave so soon, mostly because she fears her bad left leg would prove to be a nuisance during the journey, but partly because she still hopes to see “J. G. Jopling, Esq.” again. Because during their short previous encounter, despite his obvious bitterness and brutality, she has clearly seen in him somebody very akin to herself, - a person rejected and ignored by most of the society, a person in a strong need of recognition and sympathy and love, - even if he doesn’t know this himself.

 

And now she is again face-to-face with the Inquiry Agent. She hopes at first that he will notice her feelings toward him somehow, understand them, reciprocate them. His ruthless eyes reflect nothing but icy-cold determination, however, and the moment he crosses her threshold she realizes that she is destined to die at the hands of this violent man. The man whom she has dreamed of more than once at bedtime, despite the danger he presents to Serge; in whose strong embrace she has imagined herself, caressing the hard leather of his black coat, running her fingers through his short brown hair, being kissed on the face by him, kissing him on the face in return.

 

But instead of such bliss, she is subjected to torture and ruination. He is much stronger, much more vicious than she’d thought previously. He ties and interrogates her, and she doesn’t tell him anything, forcing herself to think about Serge only, to keep his dear face in her memory, to forget about this shameless intruder completely, to remember that he is just a mad homicidal creep in no need of love or compassion or whatever. She doesn’t tell him even when he cruelly tears off her blouse and starts cutting her breasts with a knife slowly, - she does scream in pain and terror, but otherwise doesn’t breathe a word.

 

She tears her brother’s telegram to pieces, squeezing them tightly in her fist. But the brute relentlessly strikes her fingers with the same small, sharp knife, while roughly grabbing her hair in his hand, as hard as steel, until she finally gives up and lets go of the crumpled blood-stained paper.

 

Then, finally, he strikes at her with an axe, and at the last moment of her life, she screams in pain and horror and desperation – but also in bitter realization that the sweetest, the most timid, the most naïve dream of her short, wretched, but - to the very end - innocent life is never to be fulfilled.

 

…<<<…()…>>>…

 

Trans-Alpine Yodel, Tuesday, October 28th, 1932.

 

_Editorial by Nikolai Z._

 

"Long-standing remains the question-mark at the end of the oft-repeated sentence: is the violence on the quote-unquote great artworks of the world polluting the minds of our suggestive citizens? Question mark. Or is wickedness bred into them by generations of malevolent cruelty and bitter ruthless malice. … Here in Zubrowka we find ourselves once again face-to-face with another anonymous homicidal lunatic. The broken record is back on the phonograph. Whose fault is it? In the last analysis, there can be no answer. Reaching all the man back to our Hellenic antecedents produces only an even grander symposium of questions without answers. Drawing on the Euclidean tradition, we find only problems without solutions.…"

 

…<<<…()…>>>…

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a line from the song “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins.  
> The extract from the newspaper article is from the Akademie of Zubrowka Historical Archives.


End file.
